s
carried on for the benefit of a political organization. The case
is entirely clear. No Mephistophelian cunning can obscure it, and
I thank God that there is abundant evidence that the end of such
a condition of things is not far off."

It was, indeed, coming. But Tammany, gorged with power and the lust of
it, neither saw nor heeded. At a meeting of young men on the East Side,
one of them, responding to an address by Felix Adler, drew such a
heart-rending picture of the conditions prevailing there that the echoes
of the meeting found its way into the farthest places: "Now you go," he
said, "to your quiet home in a decent street where no harm comes to you
or your wife or children in the night, for it is their home. And we--we
go with our high resolves, the noble ambitions you have stirred, to our
tenements where evil lurks in the darkness at every step, where
innocence is murdered in babyhood, where mothers bemoan the birth of a
daughter as the last misfortune, where virtue is sold into a worse
slavery than ever our fathers knew, and our sisters betrayed by paid
panders; where the name of home is as a bitter mockery, for alas! we
have none. These are the standards to which we go from here." And then
followed the whole amazing story of damning conspiracy between power and
vice in those tenements before which a whole city stood aghast.

A meeting was called the following day by Dr. Adler, of men and women
who had the welfare of their city at heart, and when they had heard the
story, they resolved that they would not rest till those things were no
longer true. One of their number was the Rev. Robert Paddock, the priest
in charge of Bishop Potter's Pro-Cathedral, right in the heart of it all
in Stanton Street. He set about gathering evidence that would warrant
the arraignment of the evil-doers in his district; but when he brought
it to the police he was treated with scorn and called liar.

The measure was nearly full. Bishop Potter came back from the East,
where he had been travelling, and met his people. Out of that meeting
came the most awful arraignment of a city government which the world has
ever heard. "Nowhere else on earth," the Bishop wrote to the Mayor of
New York, "certainly not in any civilized or Christian community, does
there exist such a situation as defiles and dishonors New York to-day."

"In the name of these little ones," his letter ran, "these weak and
defenceless ones, Christian